Kickstarter is a notoriously press-shy company. The founders, admirably, prefer the attention go to the projects fundraising on the site and wisely want to avoid the downside of the hype cycle by not encouraging said hype in the first place. But whether Kickstarter welcomed it or not, it was undeniably one of the biggest press stories of last year, playing a central role with two huge trends: The excitement around crowd funding and the resurgence of hardware in Silicon Valley. (Read More)

Kickstarter, the crowd-funding site that pairs indie-minded entrepreneurs with online investors, funded more than 18,000 projects in 2012, according to its end-of-year analysis. The site says more than 2.2 million people pledged nearly $320 million, with 17 projects raising more than $1 million. (Read More)